Collaborative Health Partners, a 15-location practice group in central Virginia, fields more than 400,000 patient calls a year across 300,000 patient visits. Phone hold times were the top complaint on every patient survey. After deploying Parlance, patient satisfaction scores tied to phone access improved by 65%, and the organization reduced its phone staff by 11 FTEs through attrition, with no layoffs.
Speaking at HCCT 2026, Valerie Daugherty, Director of Patient Access at Collaborative Health Partners, and Katie Cardarelli, Head of Customer Operations at Parlance, focus on what made the rollout work day-to-day rather than just the results. Daugherty describes it as the first partnership that stayed collaborative well past the signed contract, with open communication, joint problem-solving, and continuous debriefs between deployments. Cardarelli points to how closely the two teams worked together on reporting and dashboard capabilities, including the ability to listen to calls and spot trends early. Calling the partnership the real driver behind the results, with the technology second.